Agricultural biotechnology advances are being desperately
promoted in the name of eradicating hunger and poverty. What is being
very conveniently overlooked is the fact that what the world's 840 million
hungry need is just food, which is abundantly available

The communal polarisation that divided India in
the last one and half decade, with its culmination in the painful pogrom
in Gujarat have brought disillusionment to millions of Indians. But
Barnita Bagchi testifies that multiculturalism is still alive. A memrial
testament

It falls to us, disciples of the humane vision
that Edward Said helped to construct, to deconstruct the false barriers
that prevent its realization, to imagine a world in their absence and
to, in the words of his fittingly final exhortation to us, enter the
contest of values, definitions and cultures so as to bring that world
to fruition

Western scholars helped justify the war in Iraq,
says Edward Said, with their orientalist ideas about the 'Arab mind'.
Twenty-five years after the publication of his post-colonial classic,
the author of Orientalism argues that humanist understanding is now
more urgently required than ever before

If anyone wants to know why Iraqis set bombs for
American soldiers, they had only to sit in the two-storey villa in this
little farming village of Saqlawiyah and look at the frozen face of
Ahmed al-Ham and his angry friends yesterday

President George W. Bush came to the United Nations
General Assembly as an unrepentant war criminal, whose actions had violated
the UN Charter and international law by waging a war of aggression as
criminal and unprovoked as those carried out by the Hitlerite regime
in Germany more than 60 years ago

An investigation of files and archive film for
my TV documentary Breaking The Silence, together with interviews with
former intelligence officers and senior Bush officials have revealed
that Bush and Blair knew all along that Saddam Hussein was effectively
disarmed

Who is responsible for the genesis of terrorism?
Is terrorism a religious phenomenon? Is it due to the members of a single
community? How come some people come to take the steps, which surely
are suicidal for them?

In an unexpected move unveiled at the meeting in
Dubai of the Group of Seven rich nations, the Iraqi Governing Council
announced sweeping reforms to allow total foreign ownership without
the need for prior approval

The recent bomb blast in Mumbai on 25th August
2003 is a wake up call. It should shake us up into deep reflection as
to what is happening to India which gave birth to doctrine of non-violence
hundreds of years before Christ and also during our freedom struggle
in last century

'What's Right?': a bold new book by sculptor and
life-long progressive activist, Eric Aarons ponders the possibilities
of 'waging a defensive struggle' against the present dominance of neo-liberal
ideas, thus setting the foundation for a possible "counter-offensive."

Still, in a 'borderless world' full of resurgent
militant
nationalism, narrow-minded little 'patriot acts' seem to be sprouting
all over the place. Flags, emblems, colours, melodies; will they all
be divided up and loaded with meanings in black and white, or will they
be swept away by the cross-border currents of global citizenship?

For several years now, the BBC's Mark Tully has
provided indirect support to the BJP's Hindutva cause. His contention,
as reiterated in a new TV documentary, Hindu Nation, is that secularism
is unsuitable for India. The reason: it is a doctrine which keeps religion
out of public life, an attempt which is bound to fail

Sharons preemptive logic undercuts all form
of dialogue and negotiations. Its rule of thumb is violence, and then
more violence, whether it manifests itself as a military attack or as
an aggressive act of dispossession

Hard evidence of the nexus between the British
government of India and the RSS. (Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh) is available
in A Life of Our Times, the memoirs of Rajeshwar Dayal, ICS published
by Orient Longman in 1998. The RSS was supplied detailed maps of towns
and villages to enable them to attack Muslims

Two years ago, as the bombs began to drop, George
Bush promised Afghanistan 'the generosity of America and its allies'.
Now, the familiar old warlords are regaining power, religious fundamentalism
is renewing its grip and military skirmishes continue routinely. What
was the purpose?

There is a growing consciousness and assertiveness
of a large conglomerate of Muslim castes, some of whose leaders are
now seeking to advance for them a new identity as 'Dalit Muslims'. This
article examines the politics, programmes and broader agendas that advocates
of this new identity seek to put forward

In what can only be interpreted as a green light
for its Israeli allies to carry out the coldblooded assassination of
the elected president of the Palestinian people, the US Tuesday vetoed
a United Nations Security Council resolution opposing the murder of
Yasser Arafat

Robert Fisk was one of the first journalists to
be present at the scene of the horrific murders in Lebanon, September
17th, 1982. He has published a number of different books and currently
writes columns for The Independent newspaper. The following is extracted
from his book, "Pity the Nation."

Letting the Gujarat culprits get away and papering
over the gravity of what happened would be the surest way of destroying
the constitutional edifice of governance - indeed, this society. The
Supreme Court must not disappoint the public

First Seattle in 1999, and now the sudden death
at Cancun 2003, the developing world has demonstrated that it will no
longer take it lying down. Their anger and rebellion has already caused
the biggest derailment to the development agenda. And, rightly so

Mahatma Gandhi on ! Palestine written in 1938
- "Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England
belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman
to impose the Jews on the Arabs"

What is particularly worrisome about the new Muslim
terrorism is the backgroud of its adherents. Many of these young men
are well educated. They have been radicalized in a geopolitical environment
that has never been more highly fraught for the Muslim community at
large

The collapse of the WTO negotiations in Cancun
was the result of a tremendous organizing by the global south. It directly
challenged the neoliberal world and might be the first visible signs
of the possibility of a social democratic turn in the global system

On September 10, opening day of the Fifth Ministerial
of the World Trade Organization, Lee Kyung Hae climbed the fence that
separates the excluded from the included and took his life with a knife
to the heart

As a young backpacker Luke Harding found India
charming and eccentric. Fifteen years later he returned as the Guardian's
correspondent. Now, after finishing his time there, he recalls how one
terrible incident of sectarian violence in Gujarat brought his love
affair with the country to an end